At least 661 people have died in custody in Kansas

How deaths in custody are reported in Kansas

Kansas has 94 county jails and no municipal jails. The Kansas Department of Corrections (KDOC) runs 10 adult prisons and the state's one juvenile correctional facility.¹ Since July 1, 2004, state law has required the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) to investigate the death of anyone held in a KDOC prison or boot camp, in a state juvenile institution, or in a city or county jail, and to make its report available to the chairs of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Corrections and Juvenile Justice Committee. The reports are subject to the Kansas Open Records Act.¹² A 2005 amendment dropped the requirement whenever an autopsy or death certificate finds that the death was natural, or the person had been regularly attended by a licensed physician.²

I have found no state publication that lists or counts the people who die in Kansas jails or prisons; KDOC's annual report for fiscal 2024 gives no count of deaths.³ KDOC's own records of deaths from 2005 through 2024, released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, list at least 559 people who died in its custody, with facility, date and general cause, and names for most years.⁴

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Kansas Governor's Grants Program relies on KDOC for deaths in prisons and on the KBI for the deaths it investigates. In its 2023 plan, the program wrote that the KBI "does not track non-participating agencies," that the KBI does not collect deaths attended by a physician, and that "there is no mechanism for gathering such data from municipal or county jails." It wrote that the state law would have to change for the KBI to collect every jail death, and that it gives agencies no training on reporting.¹

Kansas once had an independent Ombudsman of Corrections. In 2012, after KDOC told legislators that the office had not been funded or operational for about a decade, the Legislature repealed the laws that created it.⁵⁶ In 2003, a KDOC spokesman said Kansas had had no formal jail inspection program since the 1990s.⁷

In March 2026, the Leavenworth City Commission gave CoreCivic a permit to reopen its 1,000-bed former Leavenworth Detention Center as the Midwest Regional Reception Center, to hold people for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.⁸ U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) publishes its own report on each death in its custody.⁹

What has changed

1. 1882In June, a crowd of about 100 white men forced its way into the jail in Lawrence, took George Robertson, Isaac King and Pete Vinegar from their cells and hanged them from the Kansas River bridge.¹⁰
2. 1887On January 30, a mob of at least 35 white men took Richard Wood, an 18-year-old Black man, from the Leavenworth County jail, dragged him more than a mile by a rope around his neck and left his body in the street.¹¹
3. 1901On January 15, a mob stormed the Leavenworth County jail and took Fred Alexander, a Black veteran of the Spanish-American War, to a ravine about 300 yards from his family's home, where it burned him alive. Up to 12,000 people were reported to have gathered. No one was held accountable for the lynchings of Alexander or Richard Wood.¹¹
4. 1907-1935Kansas abolished the death penalty on January 30, 1907. It restored it in 1935 but carried out no execution under the new law until 1944.¹²
5. 1932In April, more than 50 men threatened the deputy sheriff at the Cheyenne County jail in St. Francis until he handed over Richard Read, and hanged Read from a tree by a road on a ranch in Rawlins County. Governor Woodring announced the automatic suspension of the Cheyenne County sheriff under Kansas law; the sheriff was quickly reinstated, Woodring concluded that the officers were not at fault, and no one was charged.¹³
6. 1962Kansas hanged Lowell Lee Andrews, 22, at the state penitentiary in Lansing on November 30.¹⁴ The doctors who had examined him for several months found that he suffered from a severe mental illness, a "schizophrenic reaction." Kansas's insanity test asked only whether he knew right from wrong, and his jury was not told that a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity would have sent him to the state hospital at Larned, not free.¹⁵ The prison doctor pronounced him dead 18 minutes after he fell through the trap door.¹⁶
7. 1965Kansas hanged four men, the last executions it has carried out. The state executed at least 57 people before 1976.¹²
8. 1994A new death penalty law took effect when Governor Joan Finney let it become law without her signature. Kansas has executed no one under it.¹²
9. 2003Michael Phillips, 40, died in November at the Wyandotte County Jail, where he had been held since June. An autopsy found a brain abscess. Sonny Scroggins, a Topeka civil rights activist, called on the state to require an independent investigation of every death in custody.⁷
10. 2004-2005The Legislature required the KBI to investigate deaths in state prisons, juvenile institutions and city and county jails, and a year later exempted deaths found to be natural.²¹
11. 2012The Legislature repealed the laws creating the Ombudsman of Corrections.⁶
12. 2020By November 18, at least 11 people in KDOC custody had died of COVID-19, five of them at Lansing Correctional Facility, and at least 4,547 people in state custody had tested positive.¹⁷
13. 2021On September 24, after a mental health call from his foster parent, Wichita police took Cedric "CJ" Lofton, 17, to the Sedgwick County Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center instead of to a mental health facility. Intake officers Jason Stepien and Brenton Newby pulled him into a holding room, shackled him and pinned him face-down on the floor, and officers Karen Conklin, William Buckner and Benito Mendoza took turns holding him down. They held him prone for 39 minutes before they realized he was not breathing. He died two days later. The Sedgwick County medical examiner ruled his death a homicide.¹⁸
14. 2022In January, Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett announced he would not prosecute the intake officers, saying they had acted in self-defense and were immune under Kansas's stand-your-ground law.¹⁸ On December 7, county commissioners adopted a new use-of-force policy for the intake center that bars keeping a young person restrained in the holding room, limits prone restraint, and requires a staff member who takes no part in a restraint to watch it and call medical help.¹⁹
15. 2023The KBI found that Gary Raburn, 62, was strangled in his two-person cell at Lansing Correctional Facility in January. His family's lawsuit said KDOC and Centurion of Kansas, the prison health care contractor, put him, a physically infirm man, in a cell with a man about 37 years younger whose extensive history of violence they knew.²⁰²¹ In November 2024, Governor Laura Kelly and legislative leaders on the State Finance Council approved, in a closed meeting, a confidential $150,000 payment that removed Centurion from the suit; in July 2025 they approved a $275,000 settlement with the state.²⁰²¹
16. 2024Senate Bill 504, which would have banned prone restraint of young people in juvenile detention, juvenile correctional facilities and intake centers, died without leaving committee.²² A 17-year-old from Dodge City died on November 5 at the North Central Kansas Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Junction City. The KBI said he died of intoxication from a combination of medications prescribed to him, and the death was ruled an accident.²³
17. 2025Charles Adair, 50, died at the Wyandotte County Jail on July 5. The coroner found that he died of complications of mechanical asphyxia and that an officer had knelt on his back. In September, detention officer Richard Fatherley was charged with second-degree reckless murder.²⁴ By November 17, the Sedgwick County Sheriff's Office counted at least six people who had died in custody at its jail in Wichita that year.²⁵
18. 2026On February 4, a federal jury found that four of the intake officers had used excessive force on Cedric Lofton and that all five had failed to intervene, and awarded his family $8.3 million. The officers had testified that they had not been trained on prone restraint or its dangers.¹⁸ On March 4, Sedgwick County commissioners approved a $10.3 million settlement, including attorney fees, and waived any appeal.²⁶ On April 10, Charles Adair's family sued the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, Fatherley and Sheriff Daniel Soptic, saying deputies used excessive force on Adair while others failed to intervene, and that he showed signs of medical and mental health distress that called for care, not a prone restraint.²⁴

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The KBI investigates only some deaths in custody. In 2020, its director told legislators that it averaged 16.6 in-custody death investigations a year.²⁷ For 2015 through 2019, Kansas told the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics that at least 25 people died in its prisons each year, and as many as 35.²⁸ Deaths ruled natural, and deaths of people a physician was regularly attending, are not investigated, so they reach the state only through KDOC, and jail deaths of this kind reach no state agency at all.²¹ In the same testimony, the KBI opposed a bill that would have made its investigation reports on deaths caused by police public when no one is prosecuted.²⁷

The prison counts agree. The list KDOC released to UCLA matches, year by year, the totals Kansas reported to the Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2005 through 2019, and those federal tables count at least 471 people who died in Kansas prisons from 2001 through 2019, at least 31 of them by suicide and at least 3 by homicide.⁴²⁸ But the list gives no names for 2020 through 2022, and no cause for any of the at least 53 people who died in 2024, its highest year.⁴

Jail deaths have no statewide count. The Governor's Grants Program has written that it cannot gather data from county jails, and that when it learns of a death missing from KDOC's and the KBI's data, it asks the agency involved for the details.¹ What is known comes from sheriffs' own announcements: the Sedgwick County Sheriff's Office announces each death in its jail and keeps a running count for the year.²⁵ In 2003, the Associated Press reported that Kansas collected no solid figures on how many people die in its county jails.⁷